Some Republicans, like Lindsey Graham and Trey Gowdy, are supposedly taking a hard line on the notion of Trump firing Mueller.
You know what's coming, right?
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It's been, what, a few months since I've referenced one of my favorite books? Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict. I guess I'm due. Key point for today: threats have a credibility problem when carrying out the threat is costly to the threatener. Schelling was mainly interested in international conflict, so if I threaten to nuke you for some minor diplomatic incident, knowing that you're going to nuke me back, I've got a credibility problem because carrying out my threat will lead to something bad happening to me. In order for my threats to be credible, they either have to not hurt me to carry them out, or I have to have demonstrated a willingness to carry them out despite some self-inflicted harm in the act.
And that brings me to pathetic, little twerps like Lindsey Graham and Trey Gowdy. What happens if Trump fires Mueller? What would House (Gowdy) or Senate (Graham) Republicans have to do in order to carry out any punishment of Trump?
Either they have to do a real investigation themselves, or just fuckin' impeach him for obstruction of justice. Does anyone remember the Comey hearings? Did one, single Republican show any willingness to do anything other than protect Trump? No. Why not?
For the same reason that I keep pointing out. Donald Trump has an electoral bomb strapped to him, with a dead-man trigger, and the entire Republican Party is chained to him. He goes down, the GOP goes down. Every time I make this analogy, I am implicitly referencing Schelling. If Trump fires Mueller, nobody in the GOP will start an investigation, or support impeachment because they won't be willing to trigger that bomb. They will protect Trump by rallying around whatever excuse Trump uses to fire him, whether it's golf club membership fees, texts between FBI agents, or the chemtrails being generated by lizard people to cover up the mind-control rays that the Roswell aliens used to get Elvis to kill JFK before he faked his own death. Trump's party won't stop him. They could hardly bring themselves to criticize him when he talked about klansman and neo-nazis being very fine people, and that would have been costless.
Neither Graham nor Gowdy has any particular credibility either. Graham was once a Trump opponent, now brought completely to heel. He used to point out that Trump is a "kook," and worse. Now, he attacks anyone who questions Trump's fitness for office. Why? To avoid the party-shattering kaboom. Trey Gowdy? As far as I'm concerned, he ought to change his name to Mr. Benghazi. That whole "investigation" was nothing more than an attempt to concoct conspiracy theories about Clinton for electoral purposes. Hillary Clinton is a weasel, but she had nothing to do with that shit. Does anyone think that guy is going to turn on Trump?
You may not remember Trey Gowdy, but I do. He was the Devin Nunes of his day-- precisely as unethical, although rather less stupid. Lindsey Graham? He's just a worm.
It is worth remembering, though, that this isn't really specific to Trump. Remember Roy Moore?
Never forget Roy Moore. The GOP's position on Roy Moore, briefly, was that he should step aside, and not be seated in the Senate. Then, when Judge Nugent (yeah, look that child-fucker up) decided that he was just going to power through that shit, nearly the entire party decided to just shrug, because hey, it was either the child rapist, or, heaven-forfend, a... [gulp] Democrat! Even that little shit, Richard Shelby said he effectively abstained by casting a write-in vote, and Shelby was an outlier.
Shift to the presidential level, with the Trump electoral bomb, and... no. They won't turn on him. Even in the case of Roy Moore, a child rapist, Shelby made news by just casting a write-in vote.
So, who in the GOP has a credible threat to turn on Trump if he fires Mueller?
Last June, McGahn threatened to quit, and that did it. Since then, Trump has left things alone. Notice, though, that Trump's statements have gone in two directions: a) statements about how he is being cleared of collusion charges, and b) statements about "deep state" conspiracies.
The first part? He really may think, on some basis, that someone might go down, but not him, in which case he has no reason to fire Mueller. On the second part, that's just laying the groundwork in case he gets the sense that charges are coming.
Will Trump fire Mueller?
I wouldn't even dare to place odds on that. If Trump thinks that Mueller is close to anything incriminating, then yes. Everything that he is doing is laying the groundwork for that, and nobody in the GOP would stop him. If he thinks he can slip through this without firing Mueller, though, that's his preferred course. That's probably what McGahn told him.